Hardcore Zen by John G. Singer

Big AI Searching for Strategic Fit

John G. Singer — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:30:44 GMT

In July a thousand people in Effingham County, Georgia filed into the county’s College & Career Academy for a forum about Project Camellia, a $20 billion, 1,400-acre OpenAI data center campus. Assuming it goes forward as planned, it would draw up to 3.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power millions of homes.

Project Camellia had been public knowledg…

How to Manufacture a Market

John G. Singer — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:30:48 GMT

The New York Stock Exchange lists roughly two thousand companies worth some forty trillion dollars. It grew out of two sentences.

In May of 1792, after two months of negotiation, twenty-four stockbrokers and merchants came together on Wall Street and signed the Buttonwood Agreement, a document that ran to sixty-seven words of obligation. They agreed to “…

When Your Adversary is a Complex Adaptive System

John G. Singer — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:30:34 GMT

Every strategy contains an unwritten specification of what will hold still while the plan executes.

The dependent clause is rarely stated, because stating it would invite argument, and because the people writing (and selling) the plan have usually mistaken it for the ground rather than what it is, a bet, a theory. The sense of mastery is the product, exp…

Iran is Out-Thinking the United States

John G. Singer — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:38:13 GMT

Iran’s continued defiance of the United States represents more than a tactical success. More and more, Iran treats separate theaters as components of a single strategic system. The result is an emerging sphere of Iranian influence built not through conquest but through persistent, tenacious disruption.

— Robert A. Pape, “Iran and the New Rules of Global …

Visa Goes to War Against a Copy of Itself

John G. Singer — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:31:19 GMT

Dee Hock founded Visa nearly sixty years ago. His real invention wasn’t the card but the form of the organization behind it. Now the system he built is asking the United States government to tariff a copy of itself.

Dee Ward Hock was born in North Ogden, Utah, in 1929, the son of a utility lineman. He had a two-year degree from Weber College, then a juni…

In Search of What IBM Can’t Find

John G. Singer — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:30:24 GMT

For six years Leonard Nimoy hosted a television show from the edge of dark water, in a beige jacket, telling America what might be down there.

The show was called In Search Of…, a half-hour series about things nobody could explain — the paranormal, the missing, the monstrous — and it ran from 1976 to 1982, a hundred and forty-four episodes at twenty-thre…

How to Reroute an Industry

John G. Singer — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:06:16 GMT

Strategy is words before it is money. A market is a sentence before it is an economy, and the capital falls in behind the sentence and does what it says. The sentence is the capital.

That is not the soft claim it sounds like. Aswath Damodaran, the NYU finance professor known as the Dean of Valuation, argued in Narrative and Numbers that the story a compa…

Bring the Bucket

John G. Singer — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:03:51 GMT

Martin Sorrell took a sleepy Kent maker of wire baskets and, over three decades, built it into WPP, the biggest advertising company in the world. Recently he called the wreck of it “catatonic.”

It is the wrong word for a wreck. A wreck has already happened. Catatonic is a state of being, and it is the right word for the strategy meant to restore it to gr…

Losing the Plot

John G. Singer — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:17:58 GMT

The light is good in the photograph. That is the first thing a person registers, before the horror arrives.

Spring light over southern Poland, the kind that warms the back of the neck and makes everyone look healthy, and a young woman has found the best of it. She reclines on the rail with her head tipped back and her face to the sun. Sunglasses. One kne…

Eli Lilly Understands Keystone Advantage

John G. Singer — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:16:44 GMT

A medicine is priced as though its worth were settled the day the label clears — a number stamped once, assumed true forever. It is the most expensive misconception in the industry, and the one underneath the policy arguments blocking health-market innovation the world over.

The “value” of a drug is not fixed at approval. It moves. It gains force where t…

Elon Musk Invents Economies

John G. Singer — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:31:50 GMT

For six seasons on the Sundance Channel, a documentary series called Iconoclasts did one simple thing. It put two visionaries from unrelated fields in a room and let them interview each other.

Jane Goodall and Charlize Theron. Quentin Tarantino and Fiona Apple. Dave Chappelle and Maya Angelou. Hugh Jackman and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. The wager of the …

Would You Go to China to Cure Your Dad's Cancer?

John G. Singer — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:17:06 GMT

In Chicago last week, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the most prestigious cancer conference in the world, one of five coveted plenary slots went to a drug developed entirely in China, the first time in ASCO’s six-decade history a China-only asset had earned the primetime stage.

The trial belonged to Akeso, a publicly…

When Everyone Builds the Same Company

John G. Singer — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:14:02 GMT

Two laws of nature hold the universe together. Nothing travels faster than light. And everything runs down over time toward an end state of absolute uniformity, the condition physicists call heat death.

The name misleads. Heat death is not hot. It is the moment heat has spread so evenly that no corner of the universe is warmer than any other, every gradi…

Driving Under the Influence

John G. Singer — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:15:10 GMT

My closing keynote at ISPOR 2026 in Philadelphia last week carried a title in the form of a question: What Are We Innovating For?

The argument was that an entire premise of competition in the drug market — the primacy of the breakthrough — is kinetically trapped inside an inherited screenplay and thus unable to reorganize itself around the question that …

On War, Walgreens and WPP

John G. Singer — Tue, 19 May 2026 12:11:32 GMT

Ray Dalio was asked recently by Ross Douthat of The New York Times whether America was still number one. Dalio, who founded Bridgewater out of his apartment in 1975, who predicted the 2008 financial crash, who has spent fifty years building the largest hedge fund in the world by reading the rise and fall of empires, did not answer the question directly.…

McKinsey vs. McKinsey

John G. Singer — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:13:03 GMT

Kevin Kelly saw this coming twenty years ago.

In a 2006 essay he republished on his Substack last week, Kelly — the founding executive editor of Wired, and one of the more accurate long-range observers of how technology and knowledge interact as a biological process — argued that the scientific method was not a fixed thing but a living one. An organism e…

The Last Magic Quadrant

John G. Singer — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:19:26 GMT

This essay is also being serialized in three parts in the Hardcore Zen email, leading up to the closing keynote I will deliver at ISPOR 2026 on May 20. What follows is the full version.

Brian Eno and the Death of The Plan

John G. Singer — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:15:51 GMT

There is a man in a studio in Notting Hill who has spent fifty years proving that the most dangerous idea in any creative enterprise is the conviction that you already know what you are making.

His name is Brian Eno.

He was the art-school provocateur who electrified Roxy Music before the band’s second album, then walked away to become the producer who gav…

Who Gets to Set the Terms of the Age?

John G. Singer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:13:51 GMT

There is a particular kind of document American companies have learned to produce in the last twenty years, and it is neither a white paper nor a manifesto but something lodged, carefully, between the two. It has the length of a policy brief and the ambition of a political pamphlet. It is written in the first person plural and signed by no one in partic…

PhRMA's New CEO Needs to Think Like a Screenwriter, Not a Lobbyist

John G. Singer — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:12:26 GMT

Quentin Tarantino did not break into Hollywood. He broke Hollywood open and walked through the gap.

He did it with a video clerk’s education and a writer’s ear, and he did it by refusing the premise everyone else accepted — that genres were boxes you picked from, that rules were railings you held onto, that a career in cinema meant making a slightly bett…